PAINLESS SMS TEMPLATES

SUMMARY

Role: User Experience Designer

We already provided a few SMS message templates but clients couldn't customize them or create new ones

This allowed users to create new templates for cases that may be unique to their practice (i.e. if they focused on orthodontics) and spend less time typing the same messages over and over.

Some clients already kept a notepad on their desktop with text that they could copy-paste, so we wanted to remove the need for that external document and build that into the product

Started as a need to replicate a feature, but we dug into it and found there was a real opportunity there to improve workflow and reduce wasted time for our clients

PROBLEM

Regular teeth cleanings are the bread-and-butter of dental practicesʼ revenue, so when a patient doesnʼt show up for their appointment, that revenue is immediately lost and is difficult to recoup. Getting patients to confirm their appointments is a safeguard against no-shows, which is precisely what our automated messages aim to do - yet we observed confirmations werenʼt as consistent as our clients would like.

PROCESS

With emails being the main communication method between our clients and their customers, we sought to first improve appointment confirmations via emails. We knew these emails lacked a cohesive strategy (hello, hierarchy!) and suffered from an outdated aesthetic. Take a peek:

This is just one example of our appointment confirmation emails. Appointment confirmation campaigns had multiple variations, based on how many days were left until the patientʼs appointment. For example, if the patient made an appointment more than 30 days from today, she would be placed in the “Long-Term Reminder” campaign.

OUTCOME

We saw a marked increase in appointment confirmations with the beta group, so weʼve now rolled out the new template to the rest of our clients which number over 10,000. The main issue we ran up against had to do with the client logos at the top of the email. We received complaints from a small number of clients that their logos were too small or appeared distorted. Given our template, it was understandable this would happen since we were restricting the height of the logo, so we could ensure the call-to-action was immediately visible when the email was open, regardless of device.

Since it was a smaller-scale problem, we decided to address it with the help of our Customer Success team. They worked with our clients to update their logos, rather than us changing the design which was successful for a large majority of our clients.

Ultimately, our test proved our hypothesis and given the success of the new email template, weʼre not working to implement it across all our automated campaigns (with slight variations, to accomodate for different objectives in each campaign). Of course, none of this would be possible without the collaboration of our cross-functional teams, and the extension of that to our Customer Support team as well!